SEO is search engine optimization, that is, the art of getting your webpage into Google. SEO is important because the higher in the search engines ranks you are, the more page views you get on your page. Nielsen reported that there were 10.2 billion web searches in the US in January of 2010, and Google led the pack with 61% of the traffic. With that many people searching the web each day, it’s vital that your website be easily findable by the major search engines.
The biggest myth in optimization is that you need to pay someone to handle it for you. The most popular search engine, Google, offers many free tools and advice on optimizing your website. They actively encourage webmasters to use their tools and urge them to stay away from commercial operations that often make use of bad practices for optimization.
The basics are simple, an up-to-date site with clear, unique page titles, descriptive meta-tags and an easy to follow page structure. The easier it is for humans to get from one page to another, the easier it will be for the “googlebots” to get there as well. Google and other search engines use software known as crawlers or spiders to read your site and catalogue titles, keywords and the site map and use this information to get to index your website. Google offers an easy to read easy to followstarter guide to help(warning, pdf).
Links from other sites also play a vital part of search engine rankings, but this is not something that can be commercially optimized, despite what some companies want to sell you. Search engines such as google strongly discourage “link farms” which are just pages full of links. They do not add to your rankings and can actually have your site delisted from the major engines.
In short, the best way to optimize your website is to have a good one. Clean code, dynamic current information uniquely presented will naturally bring your website to the top of the results.
